INTERNATIONAL PRESS ARTICLES
2001
Le Monde, "Le drame du Liban vu par ses artistes,"
Catherine Bédarida, July 24.
L’Express International, " Les cents qui font
bouger le Liban," Scarlett Haddad, March 8.
Polystyrène,"Strasbourg, Beyrouth," Sandrine
Wymann et Sophie Kauffenstein, February.
2000
Frigate, "Eliott/Elliot/Eliot," Elizabeth Brunazzi,
June. http://www.frigatezine.com
1995
The Boston Globe, "New Talent at Alpha Gallery,"
Nancy Stapen, June 22.
LEBANESE AND ARAB PRESS ARTICLES
2006
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Waynoun, ou la mémoire en
apesanteur," Colette Khalaf, April 13th.
Al-Mustaqbal, “The plea of the families of the kidnapped
in commemoration of the start of the war,” L.H., April 12.
The Daily Star, "Keepers of the word," Kaelen Wilson-Goldie,
March 3.
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Peindre c’est aussi dessiner,"
Edgard Davidian, February 18.
2006
An-Nahar, “In the street, in the open air, and under
the innocent consciousness,” Nazih Khater, September 21.
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Nada Sehnaoui ‘installe’
les souvenirs de guerre à la place des martyrs ; Projet d’art
jeu de mémoire", Maya Ghandour Hert, July 11.
2003
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Une matrice virtuelle interne",
Joe Tarrab, August 8.
Al-Anwar, "Nada …On the pages of memory,"
Claude Saba, August 6.
Al-Liwa', “The burial of memory and words in the shape
of an installation by the artist Nada Sehnaoui,” Zuhair Ghanem, July
18.
Mulhaq An-Nahar, "The field of emptiness and its fractions
by Nada Sehnaoui," Faysal Sultan, # 592, July 13.
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Le mot de la fin," Joe Tarrab,
July 19.
Al-Hayat, "Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square becomes
a collective cemetery of memories," Maha Sultan, July 10.
The Daily Star, "Old Beirut comes alive in art installation.
Artwork touches hearts, memory," Helen Khal, July 7.
The Daily Star, "Artist captures memory in a public
space," Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, July 7.
An-Nahar, "An installation by Nada Sehnaoui—The
memory of the city paved in the open air," Nazih Khater, July 5.
Al-Mustaqbal, “An installation by Nada Sehnaoui in
downtown Beirut—paper, memories, and longing," Yakzane al-Taqi,
July 4.
An-Nahar, "Opening of the installation ‘Atazakkar’
by Nada Sehnaoui in Martyrs’ Square—
Memories and testimonies on yellowed newspapers,” Joelle Riachi, July
2.
L'Orient-Le Jour, "Premiers pas vers le deuil de 17
ans de guerre?," Diala Gemayel, July 1.
2002
The Daily Star, "Psst don't mention the war, artists'
website challenges country collective amnesia." Ramsay Short, February
5.
2001
Al-Hayat, "Works of art on the remains of war,”
Assaad ‘Arabi, June 16.
2000
Al-Kifah Al-‘Arabi, "About Nada Sehnaoui's new
exhibition," Omrane Al-Qayssi, December 2.
The Daily Star, “Recycling yesterday’s news into
today’s art," Jim Quilty, December 2.
L’Orient-Le Jour, "Poésie Nada," Antoine
Boulad, November 27.
L'Orient-Le Jour,"Nada Sehnaoui, Peindre L'Orient-Le
Jour—Un visage fait de tous les autres", Joseph Tarrab, 21 Novembre.
L’Orient-Le Jour, "Portrait d’artiste, Nada
Sehnaoui presente Peindre L'Orient-Le Jour." Diala Gemayel, November
18.
J.-M. Gazette de L’Art et des Antiquités, "Rencontre
avec Nada Sehnaoui, peintre," Rony Asté, October.
L’Orient-Le Jour, "Exposition de Nada Sehnaoui
à la galerie Pleiades à Soho," Sylviane Zehil, June 8.
1999
L’Orient-Le Jour, "…Cerf volants d’artistes—Suspensions
en tout genre," Joseph Tarrab, July 8,
1997
L’Orient-Le Jour, "Exposition Minimaliste de Nada
Sehnaoui à Soho," Sylviane Zehil, April 3.
1996
Al-Liwa’, "The conflict of forms and the secrecy
of signs and symbols," Zuhair Ghanem, October 16.
As-Safir, Nada Sehnaoui at Epreuve d’Artiste—Temperamental
organization through extreme expression," Ahmad Bazoune, October 16.
Al-Anwar, "The third exhibition of Nada Sehnaoui—visions
on paper that bring back the colors of the war," ", Claude Saba,
October 20.
An-Nahar, "Nada Sehnaoui—When weaving deeply-rooted
diversified living gesture," May Menassa, October 12.
L’Orient-Le Jour,” Nada Sehnaoui chez Epreuve
d’Artiste”, Zena Zalzal,10 Octobre.
1993
La Revue du Liban, "Nada Sehnaoui... Pavane pour une
ville blessée," Sonia Nigolian, July 31-August 7.
Magazine, "Sur les traces de nulle part," C.G.,
July 30.
As-Safir,”Artist Nada Sehnaoui,’Erasing the memory
of war is uglier than the traces of war’.” Toni Masaad, July 22.
L’Orient-Le Jour, "Nada Sehnaoui ou les fragments
d’une ville," Edgar Davidian, July 22.
Eliott/Elliot/Eliot
Elizabeth Brunazzi
When Reading T.S. Elliot [sic]
Mixed Media Works on Paper
by Nada Sehnaoui
Pleiades Gallery, 591 Broadway, New York City
May 16-June 3, 2000
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I hadn't been reading the work of T. S. Eliot, not in a long while. He was diminished for me as a college student, as for many others, I suspect, by those allusion-hunting critics and the editors and professors who followed them in the sixties and seventies. I didn't want to read all those footnotes. And I still like my poetry raw.
Nada Sehnaoui lures me back to reading Eliot because her work — the act of a visual artist abducting the poet from the academicians — presents his poetry more or less naked.She inscribes her selection of Eliot's texts on a grid of white-paper flaps (flags?) resembling little books and frames them on vividly painted blood- and sun-hued grounds. The experience is agreeable, something like dancing on graves in a Swiss cemetery — let us say Fluntern Cemetery in Zürich where the dense profusion of red flowers almost, but not quite, camouflages the white gravestones. And where James Joyce is buried (an oxymoron).
I like to think of Sehnaoui as a Joycean reader of Eliot. Her entertainment of the Missouri-born poet has a distinct gaiety to it, and a determined assertion of vitality runs through it. Her "irony" is hardly a fit with Eliot's (as the press release claims), which is somber — gorgeous but grim. Sehanaoui's interpretation of the century's most "metaphysical" poet is a gleeful romp through the complicated ceremonial of Eliot's work. Her reading is naïve, fearless, and fun. "The Hollow Men" with their straw brains and "Phlebas the Phoenician," who was "once handsome and tall as you," but now lies decomposing in the sea, don't scare her. Perhaps not enough.
"Reading T.S.Eliott, East Coker", 1999.
Mixed Media and Paper on Canvas
59" X 39"
by Nada Sehnaoui
Four out of the seven large-scale (57" x 58", 59" x 39",
for example) works on paper incorporate fragments of Eliot's poems inside
the little white books, and they are the most successful. The texts re-emerge
from a great depth, some from among a welter of roses, an Eliot salvaged
for the year 2000 (they are dated 1999). The announcement for Sehnaoui's
show, however, features two of the three wordless pieces in which the little
books, collaged onto bright ochre grounds, contain predominantly red images
of little flowers, crosses, and bird-like blots. These pieces are much less
successful as stand-alone mixed-media paintings than the ones that work
with visual interpretation of texts, but the wordless pieces take on interest
in the vicinity of the ones where Sehnaoui has us read Eliot with her eyes
and through her hands.
The announcement for Sehnaoui's show, her second at *Pleiades, is also noteworthy in that the titles of the mixed-media pieces refer to a "T.S. Eliott", while the title of the exhibition is "When Reading T. S. Elliot." Meanwhile, the excerpts from a critical article by Denise Bibro inside the announcement brochure concern yet another "T. S. Eliot." Is Sehnaoui slyly suggesting that there is more than one T. S. Eliot swimming around in the exhibition? That authors are onomastically polymorphous while texts are inevitably polysemous? Darned right.
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DRAWN ON IN THIS ESSAY
T.S. Eliot. The Wasteland and Other Poems. Intro. Helen Vendler Signet Classics,
1998. Mass-market pb, 224 pages, $3.95. ISBN: 045 1526848
*In addition to her two exhibitions with Pleiades, Sehnaoui has shown at Alpha Gallery in Boston, Rosseler Gallery in Munich and Musée Nicolas Sursock in Beirut. She has studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and at the University of Paris.
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